The Bin Ladens Read online

  In the manner of every sheikh and prince in Arabia, Bin Laden installed his wives in his Jeddah compound, each with a household of her own but segregated from contact with men other than him or the wife’s relatives. Sometimes his ex-wives stayed on at his compound after their divorce. It was customary for wealthy moguls like Bin Laden to ensure that women he divorced had ample means. In some cases this might be accomplished by arranging for the divorced woman to marry a new husband with a steady job. If a wife gave birth to a son, Islamic law ensured that the boy would eventually inherit a share of his father’s wealth, and the boy, in turn, was expected to ensure the welfare of his mother. In any event, by the autumn of 1953, Bin Laden had more than enough money to support his expanding family. He was never extravagant or particularly acquisitive in his personal habits, except when it came to women. The family compounds he built, while comfortable, were not as opulent or garish as many of the palaces he built for the royals. He did not seem to have time for indulgences. Mohamed Bin Laden appeared to enjoy work above all, and his ambition was far from sated.

  THE AMERICAN EMBASSY supplied Abdulaziz with aphrodisiacs to curry favor with him, but in his last years blindness and impotency deprived the king of the pleasures so long at the center of his life. He withdrew into his court and his harem. Saud, his heir, was fifty years old, but the king still treated him and his other older sons like children, insisting, for example, that they stand in his presence unless he invited them to sit down. Some of his adult sons disappointed Abdulaziz; Mishairi, at about twenty years old, disgraced the family by drinking himself into a rage and shooting to death a British diplomat, Cyril Ousman, whom Abdulaziz had known and liked. Only afterward, in late 1952, did the king impose a formal ban on alcohol in Saudi Arabia.24

  There was no single Bedouin tradition of succession, but a common practice held that new rulers should be chosen by consensus, on the basis of their ability to lead, and not strictly by primogeniture. Abdulaziz had long before arrogated the decision about succession to himself, however, and he had designated Saud as his political heir, despite Saud’s manifest indiscipline, which by the early 1950s included heavy drinking. The king did sense that the crown prince would need help, and so he cultivated an uneasy partnership between Saud and Faisal, his second son, born to a different mother. Faisal was an austere and enigmatic man who seemed more suited for leadership than Saud. To cement this arrangement, and to overcome the tension that was palpable between his two sons, Abdulaziz declared that succession would pass laterally, from Saud to Faisal, rather than through Saud to his own eldest son.

  In October 1953, Abdulaziz fell gravely ill at his palace in the mountain town of Taif, a retreat from the humid coastal air of Jeddah. On November 8, as the king’s condition worsened, Saud flew to Jeddah, where a military band and a parade festooned him. Word came to him the next morning that his father had arrived at his last hours; Saud rushed to Taif, but too late—Abdulaziz had died that morning in Faisal’s arms. Scores of family members had assembled around the king’s body by the time Saud arrived. To dispel the uncertainty that hung over them all, Faisal pulled a ring from his dead father’s finger, approached Saud, and presented it to him in obedience. Saud handed the ring back and announced that Faisal was his heir and crown prince.25

  Faisal accompanied his father’s body on an airplane to Riyadh, where in the Wahhabi tradition, which rejects the adornment of gravestones and other memorials to the dead, Abdulaziz was loaded onto a truck and buried in an unmarked desert graveyard.

  Saud remained in Jeddah. He sensed that his life was about to change profoundly, and that somehow he needed to address the financial chaos and social inequality in the kingdom he had inherited. On the day after his father’s death, he met with the American chargé d’affaires and asked to discuss a “private and secret matter.”

  The new king lamented his land’s low standard of living. He pledged to begin a “war against widespread poverty, ignorance, and disease,” and said he was “determined to emerge victorious from this war.” He would build schools, hospitals, military bases, and highways. He said he was “sickened” by the unsound financial practices in the kingdom. He recognized, he said, that efforts to eradicate “corrupt practices” would have to “begin with himself.”

  He had just one request, he continued: The kingdom was broke, and he wondered if the United States might lend him $300 million.26

  4. THE GLORY OF HIS REIGN

  AT THE TIME of Saud’s ascension to the throne, American oil companies paid about $20 million each month to the Saudi treasury. Mohamed Bin Laden received a fixed percentage. He appears to have been the only person, apart from Suleiman and the royal family, who had direct access to Aramco payments during this period. In theory, his allowance would ensure that he could finance the many building projects he was assigned, whether these were palaces or highways, as the British commercial secretary J. M. Heath wrote in a confidential dispatch to London. In practice, however, the kingdom’s state of “administrative chaos” meant that Bin Laden, despite having “influential connections,” was nonetheless “obliged to take on all manner of work whose cost, had it been fully carried out, would have far outrun his resources (which, as it is, may well be over-strained).” Bin Laden’s work had fallen to a standstill, apart from those jobs he could pay for with his Aramco installments. Overspending on palaces and luxuries had left the royal treasury, once more, facing an “extreme shortage of cash.”1

  In late 1953 Bin Laden decided to reorganize his company, which was known in Jeddah by the same informal title he had given it when he arrived from Wadi Doan more than two decades earlier: Mohamed and Abdullah, Sons of Awadh Bin Laden. He assigned this task to FuadZahed, an Iraqi engineer trained in the United States. Zahed decided to turn Bin Laden’s “amorphous organization” into professional departments—one for administration, another for construction projects, and a third for new industries. Zahed hoped to persuade the new king to build a cement mill, a tile factory, an iron foundry, a pottery factory, and an aluminum plant. He also wanted to pursue agencies for the exclusive import of industrial equipment from Europe and the United States. Like his employer, Zahed harbored “ambitious plans,” Heath concluded.2

  American advisers told King Saud that he could not expect anyone to lend him money until he put his financial affairs in order. Throughout 1954, Saud’s first full year in power, “royal expenditures were immense,” the discouraged American embassy in Jeddah reported:

  The King, visiting neighboring countries with his heavily spending entourage, exhausted the state treasury during the spring of the year. While reports of the largesse he dispensed abroad filtered back to Jidda, salaries of Government employees were delayed because of insufficient funds. The Government’s debts to merchants were ignored. A palace building program was begun, and its cost was heavy. Conservative estimates ran from $30 million to $50 million. Others were higher. In the midst of this spending orgy, a few voices could be heard calling for responsibility in high places. But for the most part, those who could lined their pockets.3

  Mohamed Bin Laden, of course, stood near the head of this queue. He managed to hold his place despite a major palace shake-up. Encouraged by his half-brother Faisal, Saud forced Suleiman into retirement in the summer of 1954. Yet Bin Laden remained the king’s favored builder; he had an uncanny sense of how to maneuver among the factions of the royal family and its retainers, and he had already distanced himself from Suleiman by the time of his mentor’s fall.

  Bin Laden became preoccupied by a frantic attempt to improve electricity supplies in Jeddah. The problem was that when King Saud brought his train of wives, concubines, and slaves to visit his Red Sea palaces, the lights and air-conditioning sometimes flickered out; this greatly annoyed the king. Early in 1954 Bin Laden joined with Mohamed Alireza, patriarch of Jeddah’s oldest and most influential merchant family, to buy shares in the newly formed National Company for Electrical Power, Ltd., under a license granted by Saud. The compa
ny raised about 2 million pounds sterling and inherited some Swiss turbines from the government, but its board of directors couldn’t decide on a plausible plan. When Saud and his family camped in Jeddah during the summer of 1954, his household sucked up so much of the city’s electricity that more than half of the town had to go without for twelve to sixteen hours each day. Bin Laden turned to an American firm, Burns and Roe, headquartered on lower Broadway in New York City; its engineers promised to ease the crisis by installing the mothballed Swiss generating equipment. The Burns and Roe engineer who flew to Jeddah found Bin Laden “instrumental in winning over the doubtful shareholders” in his electric company—and anxious to see the city’s supply improved before the king returned in the summer of 1955 and ran all of his air conditioners again.4

  Mohamed succeeded. Evidently pleased, the king issued a royal decree on July 22, 1955, which named Bin Laden a state minister of the Saudi government. It was not an administrative position, as Saud barely possessed a functioning cabinet, but it did signal Bin Laden’s increasing influence. The contracts he now controlled were large and varied. The West German embassy reported at the end of 1955 that the annual revenue of his enterprise was about $200 million. That may have been an overestimate, perhaps a considerable one—if true, it would have meant that Bin Laden had access that year to the equivalent of more than half of the kingdom’s oil royalties from Aramco. Like the Saudi princes who patronized him, Mohamed Bin Laden possessed a wealth of assets, but he did not always have a lot of cash; princes demanded that their palaces be finished very quickly, but afterwards, they turned into sullen dead-beats. In some seasons, documents depict Bin Laden scrambling to obtain local bank loans of just several million dollars, but in others, he was able to deliver large hard currency payments to foreign accounts. His accounts receivable department always looked good on paper, but his cash holdings were volatile. Still, the $200 million West German revenue estimate certainly reflected the scale of Bin Laden’s visible activity in the kingdom at this time. In addition to his many palace projects and the gargantuan undertaking of the Jeddah-to-Medina road (which proceeded slowly under the twin burdens of poor conditions and late payments), Bin Laden built a water pipeline into Medina, installed electric generators in that holy city, built a new headquarters for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, paved streets in the eastern city of Dammam, and ran a marble factory. He hired American engineers to survey a gypsum deposit where he hoped to build a $1.5 million factory. By now he was also doing so much business with the United States that he retained an American agent to coordinate his purchasing and contracts in that country: International Development Services, Inc., of New York, New York.5

  Bin Laden and his brother Abdullah had by now become legends in their hometown of Rabat, in Wadi Doan; they were the latest of the many Hadhramis who had walked out from that region’s canyons in sandal-clad poverty to earn a fortune that would allow them to return in glory. The brothers flew together during 1956 in a special Saudi government plane to visit Hadhramawt. Increasingly, however, they had divergent views of the future. Mohamed’s drive seemed unbounded, but Abdullah, who married at least nine times during his lifetime, increasingly felt satisfied with what they had already achieved. He was drawn to the idea of returning to Rabat to enjoy semiretirement and engage in charitable works. The brothers soon decided to go their separate ways; in 1957 Mohamed bought out Abdullah’s share of their company, twenty-six years after they had founded it together. “Mohamed was more ambitious than Abdullah and that’s why they split,” said Khalid Ameri, one of Abdullah’s grandsons. “Mohamed wanted more.”6

  Abdullah moved home to Yemen not long after this separation. He brought his wives and children with him. His decision reflected a degree of nostalgia that was not unusual among Hadhrami merchants in Jeddah. Many had secured Saudi citizenship through their endeavors, and they enjoyed great wealth, yet they remained foreigners in the kingdom, their sons and daughters excluded from prestigious marriages. There was a sense among many, too, of religious and charitable duty toward the poor kin they had left behind in Hadhramawt’s stark canyons.

  Salem Bin Mahfouz, founder of Saudi Arabia’s National Commercial Bank, opened a school in his Hadhrami hometown during this period. Mohamed Bin Laden paid for a water project in his father’s home region of Rakiyah a few years later, although he never visited the place, according to the Bin Ladens who still live there. Abdullah constructed Rabat’s first drinking water supply soon after he arrived in Rabat. He walked through the barren hills with Bedouin guides until he found a suitable spring. He then called in one of the Bin Laden firm’s Italian engineers. He supervised the piping project and also built for his family a new seven-story house with a modern plaster facade. His showy new compound rose on a slope near the center of the village of his birth.7

  Mohamed preferred Saudi Arabia, which offered him renown and relative luxury. His Jeddah garage filled up with the gleaming accessories of his success: ten 1957 Packard convertibles imported from the United States. He and his two Hadhrami banking associates, Bin Mahfouz and H. A. Sharbatly, president of the Riyadh Bank, “are known as the ‘Three Great Illiterates’ of Saudi Arabia,” wrote the West German ambassador in September 1957. “Due to his energetic and determined character and a mixture of shrewdness and honesty, he has a good reputation.” A second West German report the following summer described Bin Laden’s firm as “the richest company in Saudi Arabia…whose assets and wealth are said to exceed by far those of the entire state,” buoyed by “some sort of monopoly for state orders” granted by King Saud.8

  As his prominence grew, so did the risk that he might become ensnared in the factionalism and rivalry that constituted politics within the Saudi royal family. There were more than forty Al-Saud brothers who were nominally heirs to the throne, plus scores of mothers, wives, and former wives, all competing for access to the treasury; the potential for an outsider like Bin Laden to err was very great. If he did so, he could lose his contracts, his company—or perhaps his freedom. Shortly after Saud became king, he and his brother Faisal sought to involve Bin Laden in a dispute between them, according to a Lebanese friend of Bin Laden. Mohamed responded by pretending to be ill for a month. He summoned doctors to treat him and hid in his compound until the royal feud had passed. He explained his fears to this friend: “They are King Abdulaziz’s sons—whatever happened, they will not hurt each other. But I am not. My head could go.” Deference and obedience, expressed in florid Arabic, were Bin Laden’s chief political tactics, the balm he applied to soothe royal egos. As a Yemeni of relatively low social status, he did not represent a political threat to the Al-Saud, and so the wealth he accumulated, besides confirming the local cliché of Hadhrami entrepreneurialism, was not particularly relevant in Riyadh. Still, Bin Laden was careful to continually remind the royal family that he knew he served at their pleasure, that he was merely an executor of their decisions. “He told us not to get involved in politics,” his son Yeslam recalled. “We are a construction company. We are businesspeople. We do what we are told to do…This was our upbringing.”

  When he did express political opinions, they mimicked those of the royal family. During 1956, when the Al-Saud was locked in a border dispute with Britain over the obscure Buraimi oasis, Bin Laden let it be known to the American embassy that he resented U.S. policy, which he interpreted as insufficiently supportive of King Saud. For the most part, however, he kept his head down.9

  Perhaps he could sense that the reign of King Saud had become untenable. Increasingly, Faisal emerged as the figure many within the royal family wished to invest with power. As this struggle unfolded, Bin Laden’s challenge was to please both men—a difficult feat, for they were two very different leaders, with distinct ideas about what direction Saudi Arabia should pursue.

  SAUD LOVED being king—traveling from palace to palace, presiding over sumptuous feasts, handing out money, and retiring to bed with one of his wives or concubines. He had inherited his father’s heig
ht, and he could project regal dignity even as he became obese. Yet he lacked his father’s intelligence and his grasp of international politics. Saud had become heir apparent after the eldest son of Abdulaziz died in the flu pandemic of 1919, but the king had poorly prepared Saud for the throne. His boyhood education was limited to Koran memorization and the desert arts of horsemanship and falconry, at which Saud proved less than outstanding; he had weak eyesight and fallen arches, so he peered through thick eyeglasses and walked awkwardly. He reached adulthood as an illiterate and did not travel to the West until he was in his forties. Abdulaziz assigned him to serve as his principal deputy in Riyadh, but rather than absorbing the subtleties of his father’s statecraft, he was drawn instead to the example of his marriage bed; Saud ultimately fathered just over one hundred acknowledged children by an unknown number of wives.10

  Apart from his automobiles and radio sets, Abdulaziz had mainly ignored Western ideas about modernity, but his eldest son became enamored of consumer luxuries and, gradually, also became addicted to alcohol. Aramco and American government officials initially encouraged Saud’s fondness for baubles and modern conveniences. They saw him as crucial to their access to the country’s oil, and they sought to impress him with the material benefits of an American alliance.